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Martín Varela

QoE Guy

I am an seasoned and results-oriented R&D professional, with over 17 years
experience. I have participated in and managed a large number of large-scale R&D
projects, both commercial and academic, at the national and European levels. My
main field of expertise is Quality of Experience (QoE), which deals with how
users experience the services they use. QoE is a very multidisciplinary field,
spanning several technical domains such as networks, media, cloud, and web, as
well as human aspects, including business. I am also knowledgeable on a number
of other topics, such as Data Analysis, Predictive Models, Network Performance
(QoS), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software-defined Networks (SDN),
and Network Management.

I've recently started working at Profilence, building tools for test automation
and profiling.

In 2018 and 2019 I worked in the analytics team at callstats.io, figuring out
how to understand and monitor QoE for WebRTC services. WebRTC brings significant
challenges to the table when it comes to its QoE, as it comprises a variety of
real-time, multi-party, multi-modal applications. This was an end-to-end process,
from designing suitable quality models to implementing them in production (in
Clojure and Java, in the context of a real-time, large-scale stream processing
pipeline).

In the first half of 2017, I was a Senior Systems Engineer at EXFO, in the NFV
team. My work revolved around the virtualization of network probes and their
associated support infrastructure, and their integration into NFV architectures,
notably ETSI NFV MANO. There were also performance issues to be addressed, due
to moving the probes from specialized hardware to a COTS-based cloud context.

Until early 2017, I was a Principal Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre
of Finland, working in the Network Performance team, within the Communication
Systems expert area.

At VTT, I was the lead for research in the QoE domain. Besides the traditional
work on quality assessment for media services, I have also worked on other
aspects of QoE, most notably QoE management, and the business and economic
aspects of QoE.

I have also worked on ways to define, understand and improve QoE for non-media
services, in particular for Web-based services (WebQoE). This is particularly
interesting for Cloud services, and work on this subject was spear-headed within
the TIVIT Cloud Software Program. There are many possible applications for QoE
estimators for generic services, ranging from SLA definition and enforcement,
Operating Support Systems, datacenter management, and of course QoE optimization
for the different services.